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With Casey and Sophie playing on two separate teams this year (middle school and high school), we’ve watched more basketball in the past two months than ever before in our lives! The girls have both learned a lot about playing the game and have loved being on their teams…Casey even got to be a starter (as a freshman!) in one of the tournaments. And the teams really bonded through adversity. Casey’s team had a very tough coach, and Sophie’s team didn’t have enough players to have […]

Just came back from the park (which we call a forest) by our apartment and thought I’d share a few pictures. In the middle of the forest, there are three beautiful lakes (not clean for swimming, although people do…some even fish there!), a ropes course, an old Soviet-era amusement park, several coffee carts, and today we saw 3 horses!

We were almost standing still, waiting in traffic to get to the girls’ soccer game when this truck slowly came over into our lane and sideswiped us, claiming he didn’t even see us. Jason honked, and the driver finally stopped. But not before crunching the driver’s door. The police came slowly, measured slowly, took statements slowly, and left. Then an insurance adjuster came to take a long look. Four hours later, we were still sitting by the side of the road waiting to be cleared to […]

“Make new friends, and keep the old…one is silver and the other gold.” Since beginning school at the international Christian school this fall, Sophie has tried hard to do both, and she’s been quite successful, taking the silver and gold! She brought a tie-die kit back from the States this summer with the idea that she’d throw a party for her one of her Ukrainian friends’ birthdays that she missed while we were gone. And before school even started, she had already made phone calls to invite […]

In Ukraine, soccer is called “football,” as it is in most of the rest of the world besides the US. And girls typically don’t play it. But our girls do! This fall, not only are Casey and Sophie in school together, but they played soccer on the same team. All of the girls in the bottom row of this picture are in Sophie’s 5th grade class, but they were allowed to play on the middle school team because there weren’t enough middle school girls signed up. […]

For more than two years now we’ve been a part of the team of area directors that checks on fellow missionaries in Europe and the Middle East. That’s where we get our name, the EMT. No, we are not medically trained, but we are quick to act in emergency situations! We meet twice a year as a team to discuss the situations and needs of families that we support. This time, because of a conference for WV missionaries that was previously scheduled near Naples, we met […]

Casey turned 14th this year, and for a party, she wanted to do a scavenger hunt with her friends from school to a local mall, called Dreamtown. And she wanted us to make really fun and daring. (This is our introvert who is usually nervous talking to people.) So, Jason and I got creative…we had three categories: items to find, photos to take and videos to make. And the options at Dreamtown are endless. It’s divided up into areas that resemble places around the world, like Greece, Brazil, France, […]

Exactly 4 days after we arrived in Ukraine, Casey and Sophie started back to school. Sophie was very excited to get to label her school supplies in English this year! Proof that it isn’t always Sophie who starts it! The van that picks them up and drops them off every day, along with 6 other students who live in our area. Chili is sad that her favorite playmates are gone.

We’ve been listening to church bells from our local Orthodox church all morning while Sophie and I decorate eggs. She had a fever last night, so no church for us this morning, but still a happy Easter!

Two years ago, what began as a peaceful protest against our corrupt government escalated into a bloody conflict that deposed the president and shuffled the parliament. We hoped this would bring much-needed change in Ukraine. Now there’s debate about whether the new leaders are any better than the previous. What’s clear is that life has not improved for Ukrainians. Thousands more lives have been lost in an unexpected war with Russia, inflation and devaluation of the currency, and economic crisis. We see God at work through […]

This Netflix documentary is a pretty good account of what really happened here two years ago, and now it’s up for an Academy Award. It is not the whole story, but it explains some of the key events. Here’s the trailer for the movie.